Religion-wise Ultima 7 starts with an interesting idea and then wastes it: it’s been 200 years since your last trip to Britannia (the idea is that the passage between Earth and Britannia is essentially going through the fourth wall so you, the player, don’t age at the pace most britannians do), magic has started disappearing and the virtues have fallen into disuse. They were perhaps too complex to understand and follow, and since you’ve been away for the last two centuries, unable to be their spiritual leader, you have become a mere historical figure at best, legend at worst. Instead a new religion has arisen, the Fellowship, which favors traditional churchgoing and donations and offers a simple system (unity, trust, worthiness) to help ordinary people face ordinary life. It would have been be an interesting evolution to contrast with the virtues if it weren’t immediately and blatantly obvious they’re a bunch or moustache-twirling villains incarnating exactly the two things the original post says to avoid: they’re both a thinly veiled allegory for scientology and a doomsday cult seeking to destabilize britannian society (through ritual murders, drug trafficking and disrupting magic) and open a pathway for the Guardian, an evil world-conquering entity. Ah well.
Ultima 7 part 2 brings religion back in focus by using its rituals as puzzles. You get three new religions, even. Well, two and a half. The game takes place on Serpent Isle, which was home to a now extinct civilization and has in more recent times been colonized by britannians who disagreed with Lord British and fled as he was establishing the Quest of the Avatar. The three settlement they established value Beauty over Love, prefer Truth to be kept to oneself and are only interested in Courage in combat.
Only that last group, the knights of Monitor, have established rituals. The first is that dead warriors are to be cremated and their ashes kept, as they believe ashes hold the power of the deceased. The practical in-game use of that is you’ll get a monetary reward for each dead knight you bring to the crematory (and the resurrection spell doesn’t work on ashes so you can’t abuse that specific loophole). The second rite is that when a would-be knight comes of age, they have to undergo a trial where their blood is mixed with the ashes of a powerful goblin chieftain, which summons their totem animal for a fight. The animal determines which of the knights’ commands they will serve under (bears are warriors, wolves tacticians and leopards mediators). The meat of the totem is used for the celebration feast of the new knight and its fur for their knight’s cape. The new knight also gets a facial tattoo signifying their command. While we’re at it, the ashes used in that trial aren’t the only thing they’ve taken from the goblins, there’s also a ceremonial helm which is given to the greatest knight. Naturally the player has to go through all that to gain their trust.
The second religion is the Xenkan monks. Xenka was an illiterate farm wife who got visions of the coming end of the world, and left her life behind to find someone who would take her seriously. The monks eventually formed to record her prophecy and try to help avert armageddon as Xenka disappeared, predicted to return when the time would be right. The problem is the prophecy is vague and hard to interpret and the monks have formed conflicting factions over whether or not they should try and change the course of events, which makes them rather ineffectual. Turns out they’re entirely to blame, too, as when Xenka returns near the end of the game you find out she’s a very blunt and direct person who dictated them a clear checklist which they then managed to obfuscate through decades of exegesis.
The third religion is the one practised by the Ophidians, that extinct civilization mentioned earlier whose ruins are all over the serpent isle and whose magic has been partially repurposed by the settlers. The Ophidians believed the world is held together by three great serpents, with the serpents of order and chaos in conflict and kept in check by the Great Earth Serpent. This is reflected in the way their society was shaped, with a group following Order (whose cities and shrines tend to be neat and symmetrical) and a group following Chaos (whose cities and shrines are as serpentine as a tile-based engine can allow), kept together by the much less numerous followers of Balance (whose shrine reflects both architectures). Each group was led by a Great Hierophant, with the Great Hierophant of Balance as their spiritual leader.
This is also reflected in the way their beliefs are organized: there are three forces of order (Ethicality, Discipline and Logic) and three forces of chaos (Tolerance, Enthusiasm and Emotion). Each force of order has to be balanced with the matching force of chaos as unbalanced each force becomes malevolent. For example balancing logic with emotion results in Rationality while logic without emotion becomes Ruthlessness and emotion without logic becomes Insanity.
The whole force thing is rather abstract but relevant to the game in two ways. The first is that you have to go through tests based on those concepts in ophidian shrines and temples (either by manipulating and combining objects representing those forces, or by being put into situations where you must demonstrate you follow a given force). The second is that the Ophidians are right. About everything.
That’s not really addressed in the game, but the virtues were a man-made (or gargoyle-made) system designed to bring out the best in people, while that whole serpent thing’s the absolute truth and the cause behind the coming apocalypse. See, the great Earth Serpent went missing, weakening balance and prompting skirmishes between followers of Order and Chaos until someone murdered the Hierophant of Balance, resulting in an all-out war between Order and Chaos. Order exterminated Chaos, tore their serpent apart and locked up the pieces, then the Order survivors left for another world. The resulting imbalance has been slowly building up and by the time the game starts the world is coming apart since the serpents aren’t holding it together anymore. The three more recent settlements mentioned earlier in fact each unwittingly embody the corruption of a force of Order and at the midpoint of the game the remains of the Chaos Serpent are released as the Banes of Chaos, wraiths that similarly embody the corruption of a force of Chaos each. They proceed to possess your party members and lay waste to the matching settlements.
It’s up to you to understand the Ophidian forces and visit their shrines to get the stuff necessary to trap the Banes, cure your party members and put the Chaos Serpent back together, which you ultimately only manage through the sacrifice of your party’s paladin, so that the power from his ashes (yeah, the knights were right about the ash thing) may be used to hold together the new Chaos Serpent. You also have to track down all the implements of the Great Hierophant of Balance so that you may perform the ritual that’ll bring the three serpents back together and mend the world.
The real problem with Serpent Isle is that the various shrines really feel more like puzzles than rituals. Puzzles built on the Ophidian system, sure, but puzzles still. The oft derided logical extreme is when you have to solve block puzzles involving solid blocks of Order and Chaos.
During the game you also get to meet some Fellowship missionaries who weren’t part of the inner circle and are genuinely distraught that their bosses really were doomsday conspirators, as they genuinely believe in the Fellowship’s surface ideals.
Ultima 8 is in many ways the beginning of the fall of Ultima, but for all its faults it does some interesting things ritual-wise. The basic idea is, this time round the local religions and their rituals form your magic system. This is both a good and a bad idea, as it’s super interesting for worldbuilding but the rituals are too fiddly and cumbersome and the results too underpowered to be really useful compared to the old method of “open spellbook, click spell”.
First, a word about the Zealans. They’re the extinct followers of an old religion, who worshipped gods of emotion (Love, Hate and a mediator between them). You get to visit the ruins of a temple but all you have to do is place a ceremonial shield on an altar to talk to the gods for some exposition. They’re a sideshow.
The main event is the Pagans, worshippers of titans, godlike embodiments of the four elements. The titans were wreaking havoc upon the land but they eventually struck bargains (sometimes reluctantly) with the Pagans to grant them safety and powers in exchange for worship, which resulted in four different religious castes.
Necromancers worship Lithos, the titan of earth. They’re in charge of the cemetaries, as buried bodies are to serve Lithos as his undead legions. In exchange, necromancers receive powers to summon and dismiss the undead and golems, and also to cause earthquakes. There usually just one Necromancer and their apprentice. When the Necromancer grows old or weak and senses death approaching, they’re offered by their apprentice to Lithos in a ritual sacrifice that signifies their soul will live on in undeath (whereas zombies and ghosts are usually mindless). Then the apprentice graduates to being a necromancer and a new apprentice is chosen. The apprenticeship consists of going through catacombs to visit past necromancers to learn one spell from each, then to go to Lithos himself for approval. If approved the apprentice must them inter the recently deceased necromancer. Then they have to go on a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the first necromancer and that’s where Ultima 8 being the beginning of the end comes in because that bit’s missing from the game. Yeah, QC was so good they just forgot to finish that quest. No biggie, you can skip it (if you realize it’s missing, which is trickier than it seems).
Anyway, necromancy is accomplished by mixing reagents (all natural things, soil, mushrooms, bits of wood or bone, blood) in a bag, which results in small talismans you can then use to cast the spells.
Tempests worship Hydros, the titan of water. All bodies that die in water end up in Hydros’ service, though that’s not because of a bargain but because Hydros takes what she wants in her domain. As the game begins she’s been trapped in a lake, left with just enough water to survive, and so the bargain struck was that in exchange for being left alive she would grant powers over weather (plus some fancy water walking) to her captor and all his decendants. Tempests have become the de facto royal bloodline, as being able to call down lightning bolts helps with making people respect your authority. As such it’s the one school of magic that you cannot learn (Hydros tricks you into freeing her but doesn’t give you the promised powers in exchange).
Theurgists worship Stratos, the titan of air. Stratos is actually pretty chill, she offered to teach her miracles free of charge. They’re focused on healing, protection and illusion (both causing and dispelling them, and including seeing through lies, though it only works on exactly one person in the whole game). Her most powerful miracle is resurrection, but this comes at the price of the user’s sight. Air spells are performed through the use of foci, silver tokens representing the spells. An apprentice has to mine silver for each focus himself.
Sorcerers worship Pyros, the titan of fire. They trapped him in a rock, actually. Sorcery rituals were probably the form of magic most advertised for the game and were somewhat controversial: to prepare a sorcery spell you need a pentagram on which you arrange candles and reagents (all volcanic things, ash, brimstone, pumice, but also demon bones) in a manner specific to each spell and a metal talisman in the middle, which will be “charged” with the spell for later use. Sorcery is all about setting things on fire (though you can extinguish them too), blowing things up and summoning demons to tear people apart. Sorcerers are led by a Master and hierarchically ranked as Acolytes under him. To become a sorcerer you have to find a sponsor among existing acolytes and go through a few tests that rely on using the right spell to survive. Once you’re a sorcerer the traditional method of climbing up the ranks is pretty simple: kill the sorcerer whose spot you want, master included.
Your goal in Ultima 8 is to leave that world, and you need the powers of all titans to do it. So the idea is to rise among the ranks of each caste, learn their ways and the weakness of each titan (they’re not quite gods and each has a secret artifact that channels their powers that you will happily pilfer, ending the ages-old contracts that bound them to mankind). Ultimately you destroy them all and become the sole new titan, earning the power to leave.
The final game, Ultima 9, has nothing to offer to this discussion. You’re back in Britannia and basically go through the motions of unlocking the shrines of virtue yet again, but the game doesn’t keep track of virtues so it’s all meaningless ritual-wise.
